- Well, John Canemaker visited with a surprise. He brought a Bill Tytla scene. But this wasn’t Disney or Terry or Paramount. It was from a Hugh Harman film, The Hungry Wolf, made in 1940 at MGM. Not a very good film, the drawings are signed by Tytla, but they have no ladder indication for an Asst. to do the inbetweens. And most oddly, the wolves are shaded in by Tytla. Also take note of the table being animated into place. Are these animation drawings? Is it LO posing for someone else? And biggest of all, what is Tytla doing at MGM?

Since this would have been completed in early 1942, I can only assume that it was during the strike at Disney that Tytla did some work for Harman in mid 1941. Perhaps he came on as an animation director under Harman, who got credit for directing.

Here are all the drawings.

1

7

11

15

19

23

38

52

58

64

70

74

82

88

94

100

________________________.
The following is a QT of the entire scene with all the drawings included.
Since I didn’t have exposure sheets, I calculated everything on ones
(which seems to reflect the timing in the final film) and left however many

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Many thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of the drawings. It was great just touching them.

I think a lot of times when I think of animators in “the olden days” who were closely associated with one particular studio or another I tend to think of them as working ONLY for that studio, but really they were just like us; when a guy needed to get some extra cash they took on freelance work to work on at home at night or on the weekends after they’d finished their regular day job at the studio. That’s very common. I guess even a higher-up animator like Tytla may have had the need to supplement his regular income , or maybe had a slow stretch at Disney where he was able to take on outside work. I wonder if studio records would indicate whether Tytla ever had one of those unofficial “lay-offs” where studio management strongly suggested to certain artists who didn’t have an active assignment: “we’d really like you to take some vacation time now , wink-wink” (unpaid of course) because of a temporary production slow-down. Hard to conceive of that now because we consider Tytla to be The Legendary Bill Tytla (how could anyone have ever laid-off Bill Tytla?) , but that sort of thing happens. If I recall correctly, Tytla did go out in the big 1941 strike at some point, then went back in before the end of the strike, but does anyone know how long he was actually out ? If it was for a month or two or three he may very well have picked up work from another studio (Harman’s MGM unit in this case) just to make ends meet because he wasn’t drawing a paycheck from Disney during the strike.

I believe Tytla went out on strike about a month after it had started and came back at the end of it. He didn’t officially strike but he was too close to Art Babbitt to ignore it.

This would have had to have been when he worked for Harman. And it would have made sense time wise. As I wrote elsewhere, he’d have left in the summer of ’41. This film was released in ’42. They usually took 6-9 months for these films to have been done at MGM.

on 07 Jul 2011 at 11:29 am 8.Bud said …

The finished scene only vaguely resemble Tytla’s roughs. Besides the dialogue, “I didn’t hear nothing” that is missing from the roughs, the action seems slightly different. Either it’s an earlier version of the scene that Canemaker has or the watery inbetweens took out all the “pop” seen in the pose test. Also, the horrible cleanup mutilated Tytla’s draftsmaship. All the line quality and subtle anatomy is missing from the final scene. Check out how that left pinky in drawing #64 turns in! Gone.
Might it even be a different version of the finished scene that Canemaker has?